Stories

When we deployed Rails for Zombies last week, we fully utilized New Relic RPM to watch the performance of our live servers. This not only allowed us to ensure that our users were getting reasonable response times, but allows us to fine tune the number of servers we needed to keep it up and running at peak times.

Preheat, a gem by Tom Hallett, allows you to simulate requests into your Rails app, and get everything pre-cached. This way when you restart your server you can prime your cache so that first request doesn't take forever.

The Hijacker gem allows you to spy on your Ruby objects, remotely logging all methods that get called on it and all of the parameters and their return values. Might be a great way to debug, or add additional audit trails to sensitive transactions.

Heroku just added release management to their platform allowing developers to view when your app was last deployed, by whom, what the commit hash is. The public beta version (which is free) allows you to only store one previous deploy, but you can easily rollback to this deploy using "heroku rollback".

Terry Heath shares a horror story having to do with Solr indexes getting blown away randomly on his production server. The moral of the story: Don’t ever ever store your production password in source control, there are better safer places to put it, everything in lib/tasks is globally scoped, and don’t set the rails environment by default to Production.

Those built in month, day, and year select boxes that Rails uses for date_select aren't very user friendly. What you'll probably replace them with (if you're using jQuery) is the jQuery UI calendar. Paul McMahon wrote up a nice little jQuery snippet that will automatically take the date from the jQuery UI calendar and properly set the Rails helper form fields.

Back at Rubyconf two weeks ago Michael Bleigh released a library called Grape, which stands for Generalized Rapid API Erector. It’s a Domain specific language that only cares about creating a great APIs.

Nathaniel Bibler, Les Hill, and Dave Bock live at RubyConf, chasing down speakers for interviews. In this episode we chat with Jim Weirich, Jonas Nicklas, CJ Kihlbom, and Aaron Patterson about their talks.